February 20, 2005

Must have FrontPage Addons for the upcoming professional programmer

DEAR TINA: I ran across a website that has over 1700 FrontPage themes for about $200 called www.ThemePak.com . Before dropping down some coin, I wanted to know if anyone had another suggestion of a better product or company that provided much more themes or other FrontPage add-ins. I am interested in doing some website development on a professional basis and thought this theme route might make something eye catchy for a potential client. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated on themes or additional FrontPage add-ons that are a must have for the upcoming professional programmer. For the past 6 years I've designed about a dozen B+ websites for people for free and am now ready to step up to the next level and start charging for my services.

Jim Stipe (from FrontPage Newsgroup)

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Addons for the professional user

DEAR JIM: Themes! .. No you want to avoid themes that's going backwards ... templates are the way to go, your much more in control and if you have fp03 get yourself a dwt (dynamic web template) use css for your formatting and includes for the menu's.

and go to either APlus Templates

or

BoxedArt

both of which offer numerous templates for the princely sum of one fixed fee for the year in the case of APlus it's $29.95 and boxed art it's a little more at $49.95 and you also get more for that money in the way of graphics and tools.

Plus both sites do very good templates, use templates and the keyword here is control, the more control you have the more versatile you can be, and it's much easier on maintenance too.

I just reread your post ... now if you want templates that are for reselling as though you made them for clients your going to have to read the licence. Outfront.net do a package like that, you will have to look at things slightly differently if it's for using for clients.

Addon's that I use every day of the week are:

FrontLook Search Engine (many other tools also)

D2Stuff - Time management/seo/page building tools 18 of them (trial but to buy) the spacer and the page filler are very useful.

Most of the tools at InstantFX I use the free case changer several times a day.

I use Jimco tools of course, all free

FrontPage Devices - There are quite a few addons here, they also have PageTools which are great for fp02


FrontPage Power Edit 2,0 - You can use this to prepare sitewide in one go for css and a dwt rather than having to do it page by page

Jbots At Your Command - I love this one it adds anything I want to any menu I really like being able to add select all to my right click menu's, there are lots more addons here to.

There are numerous other addons I use as well. These are just a few of them I really like addons:)

I also use TopStyle Pro for CSS (for more info see css article below) as the fp interface for css is not that intuitive and helpful, but I try to work directly on the sheet as much as I can then go back to TS for validation on what I've just tweaked, using FP03 really helps as the split view and html tags really make a difference in
understanding more html and css and how it all fit's together.

If you want to start charging keep learning .. do you know CSS (cascading style sheets) if not start learning now, do you have the latest FrontPage version? Those dwt make life much easier ... do you use includes? Here are a couple of articles to give you some ideas if not.

DWT
http://www.outfront.net/tutorials_02/fp_techniques/dwt-1.htm
http://www.outfront.net/tutorials_02/fp_techniques/dwt-2.htm

Free updated DWT Ebook now available from http://frontpage-ebooks.com/

FrontPage and CSS
http://msmvps.com/frontpage/articles/13615.aspx
http://msmvps.com/frontpage/articles/13683.aspx

FrontPage Includes
http://anyfrontpage.com/ezine/va/frontpage-includes.htm

Cleaning up your FrontPage Code
http://msmvps.com/frontpage/articles/33401.aspx